Foreign Policy

The European Union has approved a preliminary plan for a naval mission to stem the influx of migrants trying to reach Europe through human trafficking and smuggling operations in Libya. At least 51,000 migrants have reached Europe this year and more than 1,800 have died trying to transit the Mediterranean. The new EU plan will ...

To date, the Obama administration’s claims of progress in the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) have been accompanied by qualifications and caveats. In January, the Pentagon claimed to have killed 6,000 IS fighters since the September start of “Operation Inherent Resolve,” a statistic that became less impressive when later that month it was reported ...

The State Department on Monday shrugged off a decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to appoint Silvan Shalom, a politician who has publicly opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, as his chief negotiator for the long-stalled peace talks.

The stories of two Sunni leaders — one a tribal chief, the other a former insurgent — show why locals opposed to the Islamic State and Iraqi officials in Baghdad have so far failed to unite against their common foe.

Chinese military officials say their massive land reclamation in the South China Sea is all about establishing peace and stability. Washington isn’t buying it.

A federal court ruled Google can post a video that caused anti-U.S. riots in 2012. Whether the tech giant does remains to be seen.

As many as 500 Iraqis have been executed in the latest Islamic State onslaught, as the extremists have overtaken the capital of the nation’s western Anbar region. But “to read too much into this single fight is simply a mistake,” a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. The Islamic State chased Iraqi security forces from the city ...

Ramzan Kadyrov says the U.S. intelligence community needed a fall guy for the bombing and found one in the form of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

By failing to help South Korea and Japan with small threats, the United States is casting doubts on its biggest commitment in the region.

Kiev claims to have captured two Russian special forces members fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Just as it took a deadly shipwreck to finally put the spotlight on the dire migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, it’s taken the stranding of some 6,000 migrants — and perhaps several times that number — at sea in Southeast Asia to raise the alarm about another migrant crisis stemming from what some observers describe ...

It took six years, but President Obama is finally on Twitter.

To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Cameron Hudson warns that Burma’s vulnerable Rohingya people may face an existential threat. Josh Machleder argues that only truth — not propaganda — will beat back Russia’s misinformation offensive in Ukraine. Manuel Arriaga proposes revitalizing our democracies not through trendy technology, but by ...

Amid fears of growing Chinese influence, a radical nativist movement wants to keep Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.

"A colonel or general ought not to exhaust himself in trying to compete with young boys running across country seven miles at a time."

“It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors, or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which the values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed.”

Afghanistan Taliban attacks continue in Afghanistan A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy from the European Union (E.U.) police training mission near Kabul’s international airport on Sunday, killing three people (AP, BBC). The bomb exploded near the office of the Afghan Civil Aviation Authority, a few hundred yards from the airport’s main terminal. The blast ...

Read this and ask yourself, which was the U.S. military in Iraq?

Hold on there, technophobe hippies. When it comes to “doing no harm,” robots are a hell of a lot better than humans.

By Paul McLeary with Ariel Robinson Things fall apart. Iraqi forces broke and fled the city of Ramadi in the face of a renewed assault by the Islamic State on Sunday, recalling the full-fledged retreat from Mosul last summer that gave the extremist group access to whole divisions’ worth of American-supplied Iraqi military equipment. Despite ...